Ecstatic Ruin: Painting Beyond Order

Vivienne Kessler ◹

The Aperture Review · Formalist critic

The premise arrives already exhausted. Abandoning order, embracing excess, chaos as meaning, the unconscious made visible through rupture and mark. We have heard this before, many times, and the exhibition does little to prove it needs hearing again.

Walk into the room and the problem announces itself immediately. Untitled (Painting) by Mark Rothko sits inert, a color field so restrained it reads like a negation of the show's own argument. Two muted horizontal bands, ochre above maroon, with edges that dissolve rather than rupture. The curator wants this to represent secularized Baroque excess, but there is nothing excessive here, nothing that overwhelms. The painting asks for meditation, not ecstasy. It is the wrong object for this thesis, and its presence suggests the curator selected from a list rather than actually looked.

Willem de Kooning's Excavation is where things begin to move. The painting is a genuine mess, which is not the same as a productive mess. Layers of cream, brown, and blue scrubbed over one another in what appears to be frantic revision. The surface is scarred, worked, almost archaeological in the literal sense. There are figurative ghosts in there, barely legible, teeth and limbs emerging and submerging. The painting admits its own incompleteness. It is not restful. That matters.

Then consider April by Lee Krasner. The canvas contracts and expands simultaneously, black gestural marks twisting against a lighter ground, but with a structural intelligence the title belies. The marks do not scatter. They cohere through a kind of muscular syntax, each stroke answering the one before it. There is abundance here, yes, but also argument. The painting is dense without being decorative. It is the strongest work in the room.

The Baroque section functions as historical decoration. Peter Paul Rubens' Rubens, Helena Fourment (1614–1673), and Their Son Frans (1633–1678) is competent portraiture, the figures arranged in a soft diagonal with light that flatters the flesh. It is a pleasant painting. Orazio Gentileschi's Danaë offers more turbulence, the woman's body caught in the midst of transformation, gold light pouring down as the god arrives. There is actual visual confusion here, layers of drapery and divine substance overlapping. But the Baroque works function in the show as validators, as if their existence centuries earlier proves the thesis was always true. They do not argue with the abstraction. They simply precede it.

I Raro Te Oviri (Under the Pandanus) by Paul Gauguin is a strange inclusion. The painting is claustrophobic, figures pressed into shallow space, earth tones and greens creating a surface that does not recede. There is something resistant about it, something that refuses both Impressionist light and conventional perspective. But the show frames it as dream-logic when what is actually happening is a flattening of space, a formal decision, not a psychic eruption. The curator reads Gauguin's biography into the canvas rather than the canvas itself.

Abstraction: Background with Blue Cloudy Sky by Pablo Picasso is a small panel, barely there. The composition is almost still-life cubism, a blue background with hints of form, the whole thing executed with a kind of restraint that contradicts the exhibition's central claim. Picasso abandoned order here, but tentatively, almost apologetically. It does not belong alongside Excavation.

The show's fundamental weakness is that it confuses visual chaos with meaningful disorder. Excess is not automatically productive. A painting can be wild and empty at once. The curator has selected works because they fit a predetermined narrative about modernism's rejection of rationality, but in doing so has assembled a group that argues nothing to each other. April and Excavation speak to something real, something about how mark-making can generate form rather than merely express it. The Rothko undercuts this. The Baroque works are scenery. Nothing in the exhibition actually builds.

This is a show that needed a narrower aim. Strip away the Baroque, strip away Gauguin, commit entirely to the proposition that Abstract Expressionism inherited a formal problem from earlier art and solved it through pure material investigation. That argument might hold. Instead, the curator has built a museum-approved survey, ten works that represent ten different things, all loosely gathered under the heading of chaos. The eye moves through the room without resistance or surprise.